The ‘No Surprises’ assessment rule

Your primary objective as a leader is to effect change (otherwise you’re a manager). Newton’s First Law states that an object will not change its motion unless a force acts on it. When that object is one of your team, one of the key ways you can act to change its motion is performance management.

What’s the issue?

It’s all too common for leaders to give performance feedback only at annual appraisal. This is a double whammy of too little too late:

1. it robs the organisation of a year’s worth of what could have been better performance had it been given in real time. And it’ll also rob part of next year to turn the arrow from flat-or-falling to rising.
2. It robs the employee of a year’s worth of personal development and recognition from what could have been better performance. And that’s a year to embed a lack of motivation. Even leaders want to be led.

Even when leaders do give regular feedback, poor performance conversations are amongst the most difficult and awkward to have, so they often water down the messages, or avoid them altogether (stay tuned for a mail on difficult conversations coming soon to your inbox).

Communication is difficult to get right and easy to get wrong. But still leaders blunder into it every day without careful construction, or practice, or empathy to understand how messages will be received. Nowhere is this more keenly felt than the sensitive subject of personal performance.

The exponential problem with performance management is that when it’s done badly, it makes poor performance poorer. But when it’s done well, it can turn anchors into engines.

Activities to consider

You can’t always expect people to ‘change motion’ on their own. Sometimes they can, and sometimes that’s a reasonable expectation. But it’s part of your job - when needed - to step in to help people step up, or if they’re in the wrong role, to step out.

If your performance assessments lack frequency, timeliness, clarity, direction, and measurement - you should expect that you will get sub-optimal performance. Even self-starter superstars need and want fine-tuning.

Don’t take ‘hire the best people and get out of their way’ to the nth degree. That’s abdication. If you’re not willing or able to do premium grade performance management, you’re not doing quite a big chunk of what it is to be a leader.

Performance management is a function of Curiosity, Courage and Velocity:

1. You have to take time out of your ‘to do’ list to investigate how people are getting on with theirs. And then understand why there’s deviation.
2. You need to be brave enough to take the tough conversations. If you do them well, rest assured that the good people will thank you, and your fortune will be favoured.
3. And you need to move quickly to give directional feedback while it’s fresh in the mind and when people have the highest chance of salvaging the situation.

Regular readers will recognise these as the 3 elements of Adaptability. That all makes good sense when you consider that performance management – especially at the negative end of the spectrum – is about dealing with difficult situations as they arise and pointing yourself and others in the right direction to see even negative change as the chance to make a positive difference.

Try this

Make yourself and all your direct reports a promise: there will be no surprises come yearend appraisal time. It should be a summary of all the key conversations you’ve already had. If there are surprises about the subordinate’s poor performance, then it’s you who’s let them down.

At HPC, we developed Adaptability Based Leadership with the express purpose of raising productivity through more engaged, better led staff. If that approach resonates, contact me and let’s get you started on the next phase of your journey towards mastering leadership.